Wyatt Cheng on 1.0.7, Dueling Could Spread to Other Acts

Wyatt Cheng on 1.0.7
Diablo 3's Technical Game Designer and author of the 1.0.7 Preview, dropped by r/Diablo to give fans a few insights about the upcoming patch and also to clear the confusion on some of the changes.

Looks like they're doing EVERYTHING people suggested so far.Give this game a years time and it will have become the game we would've liked to see on release.
Wyatt: Thanks! We've certainly all seen people leave the game and come back. One of the interesting things about being a non-subscription game is that this is okay - there are a lot of really fun games out there! Our job is to make sure that when you do come back, you are coming back to a fun experience. What I want to see is when people do fire up D3 again they think to themselves "Wow, this game is better than I remember" or "I really loved the game before but I [insert issue here] so I quit playing. But now I see they fixed my issue and I love playing again!". I love seeing comments like that on sites such as this one (/r/diablo) and definitely reaffirms the team's desire to continue working to make this game as good as we can

Thanks for stopping by but please don't let another 7 months go by without posting! You'll find the rabble rabble pitchforking can be kept to minimum with tiny replies like this. Keep up the good work.
Wyatt: This subreddit is a wonderful community where people talk about builds, publish research, advertise new videos, spread news or just share the latest "TIL". It's a fun, constructive, unique community. I think the communication and ideas shared between players can often be richer when the developers aren't overly involved.
That said - increased communication is a great idea, and it's something we're always thinking about ways to do better.

except monster density....I'm so sick of act 3.
Wyatt: Unfortunately increased monster density in Act 1 and 2 in Inferno difficulty did not make patch 1.0.7. It is absolutely something we would like to improve, and it is still on the list for the future. I spend most of personal play time in Act 3 as well: Keeps 1, Core, Tower, Bridge, Fields. It's a matter of degrees, it'll never all be balanced 100% equal in all zones everywhere you go - but they need to be comparable within a certain tolerance, and we're definitely outside that margin right now.

"We're also increasing the base pickup radius by a small amount." Easily the best change.
Wyatt: Just to make sure we're setting expectations correctly, the radius increase is modest. As mentioned in the blog, for melee characters who are very particular about saving their health globes, we wanted to make sure we didn't increase the radius so much that melee characters picked up health globes unintentionally.
So, kinda imagine a health globe dropping a melee range, we increased pickup by LESS than that. I'd tell you the exact number but I don't remember it off the top of my head and it'll be in the patch notes anyways. The bump is small.

I'm confused about the ruby. Did they change bonus from +damage to +IAS when applied to weapon. And what is this Marquise do?
Wyatt: Sorry for the confusion. The new Ruby gives flat damage increase, much like the existing rubies do. However, because of the way the math works out, the higher your attack speed, the more your character benefits from a flat damage increase.

For example, let's say Your attack speed is 1.1 If a Ruby adds 20 damage to your weapon, then it is adding 22 DPS to your weapon. However, if your attack speed is 2.4, then that same Ruby that adds 20 damage to your weapon is going to add 48 DPS to your weapon. Essentially, flat damage benefits higher attack speeds.

Our goal with the tuning on the new Ruby is that if you have high attack speed, and/or your skill build leans heavily on skills that don't crit (such as Hydra), then you may prefer the flat damage granted by the Ruby over the Critical Hit Damage provided by the Emerald. The exact tuning point has gone through some internal testing but we'll be monitoring things on PTR as well. I expect some clever theorycrafters will figure out some breakpoints for when to use one gem or another.

I'm so happy they didn't mention One With Everything.
Wyatt: One With Everything is not changing in 1.0.7. We still recognize it as an issue, but 1. We do not want to make any change that invalidates the existing gear people have acquired. 2. We have to weigh the cost of any change vs. the benefit of doing so. Does One With Everything feel mandatory to many monks? Yes (though not as much as it used to be). Is fixing it urgent? No.

I love the changes! Only thing...how should it be possible to get 5 stacks before you get to Rakanoth in Act 4?^
Wyatt: I did not mention it in the blog but Nephalem Valor should carry over from Act to Act.

The Patch Notes represent a collated list of the things that have changed in a patch. When choosing which changes to list in a Patch Preview, it's the design teams opportunity to provide some additional commentary, insight or explain the reasoning behind the changes.

They should have put in the tech to increase gold radius but not globe radius. Hopefully the minor increase eliminates walking over a portion of the gold stack and it not grabbing, but if it doesn't and they can't increase it more due to unintentional melee globe pickups, they really need to implement that separation. Right now the only build I can think of that purposely wants to pick up globes from ranges longer than 0 is the WD build that utilizes the passive that buffs you for grabbing globes.

Unfortunately it looks like they spun a lot of cycles on trying to get the arena stuff out, only to scrap it. Nothing really in these patch notes to be excited about. Hard to understand why they didn't make the 'act 3 the only place to grind' issue a priority. As much as I was hoping, very hard to get pumped for this patch, or to even log in right now.

I am excited for sure. We are inching towards what the game probably should have been on launch day.

That being said, these developers where far too resistant to creating the game they have inevitably been arriving at after all this feedback from players. They tried to sculpt a limited experience and assumed it would be enough after over a decade of waiting. I'm sorry but what we were given and have been drip-fed since post-launch hasn't been up to the standard that company created from previous titles. Blizzard's hubris killed this project. In my own semi-negative opinion of course

I'm reading all the things about D3, just because some small place in my heart still belongs to Diablo. However, playing the game happens only once a month. There is absolutely nothing that can interest me in this game. I log in, 1/2 of act 3 once, realize I have not found any useful item and log out again. It has been like that since the start. I guess Diablo has lost it's appeal to me, which is sad.

I'm reading all the things about D3, just because some small place in my heart still belongs to Diablo. However, playing the game happens only once a month. There is absolutely nothing that can interest me in this game. I log in, 1/2 of act 3 once, realize I have not found any useful item and log out again. It has been like that since the start. I guess Diablo has lost it's appeal to me, which is sad.

There's no possible way the game could ever give you multiple useful items in every run. The standard of "useful" would just continue to rise until it became rare again.